Even in the Internet Age, some news seems to travel slowly. Take, for example, the recent activities and words of President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in regard to the coming war with Iran. Neither seems aware that the U.S. Constitution was long ago amended to outlaw slavery.

Last weekend, Barack Obama dutifully reported to the AIPAC meeting and pathetically begged his audience of wealthy and disloyal U.S. citizens to be patient with him as he needs more time to prepare to attack Iran. To protect his reelection chances, Obama in essence explained, he needs to keep pursuing sanctions against Iran to prove to his party’s Pacifist/peace wing that he has exhausted all non-military options. (This, in itself, is a certain sign of Obama’s innate duplicity as there obviously is no Pacifist or pro-peace wing in the Democratic Party — nor is there an American peace movement — unless there is a Republican president in the White House.)

“Please, please, please — oh, please!,” the enslaved-to-AIPAC Obama pleaded, give me a few more months to fool the American electorate with talk of effective sanctions and then I will go to war for you against Iran and provide as many of America’s soldier-children as necessary to be killed for the Israeli theocracy. This sort of supine “Yes, Boss” performance meant to elicit campaign contributions must have been galling to an African-American like Obama — at least I hope it was. Tragically, such unmanly groveling before AIPAC is now a regular practice whoever is the president of our once-proud and once-independent republic.

Not able to tolerate the chance that he might be out-groveled — and so out fund-raised — while away on the hustings buying his party’s 2012 nomination, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney put on his best Buzz Lightyear war-face and thundered “me too — and then some!” to attract the same fifth-column, and its campaign contributions, that Obama had addressed in person. The Obama administration, said Romney, was weak and feckless when it comes to Iran, claiming that it had utterly failed to impose sanctions that would wreck what remains of Iran’s economy. This was just boilerplate, however, as Buzz Romney made clear — like Obama — that he thirsted for war with Iran. He pledged that a Romney administration would provide as much degradation of the U.S. economy and as many dead American soldier-children as needed to protect Israel and keep campaign contributions flowing from AIPAC leaders.

One can only conclude from the performances of Obama and Romney that it as not as onerous or personally degrading as it once was to be a slave. Indeed, both men were obviously secure and proud of their status, believing that a few thousand wealthy and disloyal U.S.-citizen AIPAC members wielded more retributive power than the American voters, who they simultaneously told that neither the Congress, nor the Constitution, nor genuine U.S. national interests, nor their economic future, nor their children’s lives would stand in their way of a certain-to-fail U.S. war against Iran on behalf of Democratic and Republican campaign coffers and Israel.

One can only imagine that at the end of a day in which Obama and Romney tugged their forelocks in obedience to this fifth-column, the AIPAC big-wigs must have joined their war-mongering Neocon operatives, retreated to Legree’s Big House restaurant, and enjoyed a lavish meal that resembled the barbeque-picnic scene from Gone With the Wind. There, over cigars and bourbon, they surely laughed heartily at the memory of the music-less minstrel show they had just watched, one in which two servile men masqueraded as U.S. leaders and, in their search for lucre, had willingly demeaned the security, integrity, manliness, independence, and future of the American Republic.

''I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.'' Barry Soetoro